This past week, the Stardust flight team had two periods of communication with the spacecraft courtesy of the antennas of JPL's Deep Space Network. The telemetry relayed during this interval indicated the spacecraft is healthy and all subsystems were running normally.

During the second period of communications the Stardust team successfully powered up the spacecraft's Comet and Interstellar Dust Analyzer. This instrument is a mass spectrometer that will be used to study the chemical composition of individual particulates in the comet's coma during Stardust's encounter with Comet Wild-2 next year.

For more information on the Stardust mission -- the first ever comet sample-return mission -- please visit the Stardust home page: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov.